Smash Notes
Cindy Wu. Co-Founder of Jelly.
"We find holes in the ground and then we…explore them. And it kind of feels like maybe what Neil Armstrong felt like when he first stepped foot on the moon." SNP’s founder Maureen Taylor talks to Cindy Wu, co-founder of Experiment and Jelly Labs. They talk about how Hawaii has changed how she designs software, her belief in science equity, and her unusual…
People
Notes
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Cindy started feeding fish and culturing sea monkeys in a Lalita Ramakrishnan's lab. During her junior year she was awarded a scholarship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and started working in James Bryers designing cell-based immunotherapies. That summer, she spent evenings in David Baker's lab working under grad student, Justin Seigel.
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The paper attached to this note is Cindy Wu's Chemokine Programming of Dendritic Cell Antigen Response, part one, on select chemokine programming of antigen uptake even after maturation. The link is https://poster.jellypbc.com/@cindy/mlacqk-chemokine-programming-dendritic-cell-antigen-response-part-i-select-chemokine-programming-of-antigen-uptake-even-after-maturation On the episode she describes the lab behind that work. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant funded her and other undergraduates who had no research experience. She joined an immunology group trying to design a universal vaccine: take white blood cells out, teach them to recognize cancer or tuberculosis, and put them back. She published one paper from the project. She says related technology is already used by biotech firms, including one building a prostate-cancer immunotherapy, and that it remains expensive.
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Dendreon was a leader in the space in 2010.
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Yes! You can join the University of Washington International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team. There are hundreds of teams across the nation. You can find out more about how to join or start a team at https://igem.org.
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https://fold.it/
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When Cindy's little brother, Sean Wu , was able to publish a peer reviewed scientific article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry as an 18 year old, she realized that perhaps one did not need a PhD to make a meaningful difference in science.
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Cindy Wu's linked paper is Improvement of a Potential Anthrax Therapeutic by Computational Protein Design, from the Journal of Biological Chemistry: https://poster.jellypbc.com/@cindy/nslfku-improvement-of-a-potential-anthrax-therapeutic-by-computational-protein-design-2 She and her cofounder Denny joined an undergraduate team in iGEM, the synthetic-biology competition at MIT, on a U.S. Army grant. They used Foldit, the protein-folding game from the University of Washington, to swap amino acids in an anthrax protein. Of 87 models they tested in the lab, two worked. She says her younger brother, then 18, did most of the work and published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. That is what made her ask whether a PhD is required to do real science, and it led her toward Experiment.
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Cindy Wu says she and her cofounder Denny started Experiment in 2012. A researcher posts an idea, raises money from the public, and, if it funds, does the work and shares it. By this conversation she had been on it for eight years. They began as two students in a lab who taught themselves to code and put up a website. A year later they raised $1.3 million and hired. She says she woke up every day convinced she did not know what she was doing. People told them nobody would fund strangers on the internet. She stopped trying to win that argument. They built the site and pointed at projects that were actually getting paid for.
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Within a year after their start, Cindy and Danny went from two kids working in a research lab, not really knowing what they were doing, to raising $1.3 million with a team of employees.
When they first started experiment, everyone thought it would never work, and there was not much Cindy could say to change their minds. Instead, she changed their minds in other ways, by showing real world examples, where strangers were willing to fund science projects via internet.
For more on Experiment, check out this WSJ post - Experiment.com Gains Big Venture Backers To Bring Crowdfunding To Science Research.
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Our Process https://jellypbc.com/posts/2019-10-23-our-process
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"The state of Hawai’i introduced an "Aloha Spirit law" in 1986, which mandates that city and state employees greet the public by using the words Aloha and Mahalo."
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Cindy Wu's note on how to start points to a local chapter of the National Speleological Society at caves.org, and to her own guide at https://cindywu.org/@cindy/so-you-want-to-cave-DF3MNY On the episode she describes the trips those groups make. Three or four people climb into a hole and go for miles. At a fork that is not on the map, they send one person ahead. She has been in a passage with no footprints and compares the feeling to what she imagines Neil Armstrong felt on the moon. She also calls it a physical version of startup work, stepping somewhere nobody has recorded. The society chapter is how a new caver finds the other three people.
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After this interview, Cindy started drawing and painting every day because she felt she mischaracterized herself. You can find some of her drawings on Twitter. https://twitter.com/cindywu/status/1239248599172542464/photo/1
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Breaking the rules is key to a successful discovery.
When you think of rules, all rules are made by humans, and then somes rules get modified by future humans. So if the rules today are not serving us, then us as humans can modify them to be something else.
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Cindy posted a thread here: https://twitter.com/cindywu/status/1247199590119399425
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By 18, Cindy had fallen in love. That is the only accomplishment Cindy wanted to achieve before dying. Everything else feels like a cherry on top.
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Cindy and Maureen met through a mutual friend. The first time they met in January 2017, Maureen asked Cindy when she and Denny were going to get married. Cindy and Denny are not married.